Despite my better judgment, I did some imaging late last night in gusting winds. To be honest, my CGEM mount handled things quite well until the winds really picked up. Anyway, I love imaging the Sword of Orion region and have been patiently waiting for it to rise high enough so I can try imaging it with the D7000. The result is very nice. I need to learn how to layer shorter exposures so that the core isn't as burnt out. I'll start researching that soon - it's probably really simple. The megapixal size of the D7000 allows me to produce nice, clean, larger images than my D40.
Image Details
- Imaging Scope: Astrotelescopes 80mm ED Refractor
- Imaging Camera: Nikon D7000
- Guiding Scope: William Optics 66mm Petzval Refractor
- Guiding Camera: Meade DSI-C
- Mount: Celestron CGEM
- Exposures: 4 * 5 minute lights
- ISO 500
- Aligned and Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
- Post-Processing in GIMP (contrast, saturation and unsharp mask)
That's excellent, Phil! Very nice. Nicely framed, and the core just looks brighter than the rest. Excellent capture. Looks like you'll have fun with the camera. I had a hard time getting that much blue in the image with a DSLR. It's a much more pleasing presentation than the red my DSLR tends toward.
ReplyDeleteThanks, mate! I have a feeling my optics might have more to do with with the blues in my image as opposed to the D7000. Most pictures I take through my ED80 seem to have blues come out really easy, sometimes to a point of annoyance. I need to find an object that doesn't have many blues in it to test this.
ReplyDeleteNice work, Phil! This is a fun object to work with, as it presents a number of different processing challenges. I wrote up a tutorial on using layer masks to combine multiple exposure lengths of the Sword of Orion using GIMP. I can put it on my site if you're interested.
ReplyDeleteHi Rory. Yes, would be very interested to see those instructions. While I messed with it some last night, I think I can do a better job. I appreciate that!
ReplyDeleteCheers.